New resources in the sciences and technology, especially pertaining to academic and scholarly pursuits.

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Monthly Archives: January 2009

Academy Honors 18 for Major Contributions to ScienceJan. 28, 2009: The NAS will honor 18 individuals in 2009 with awards recognizing extraordinary scientific achievements in the areas of biology, chemistry, geology, astronomy, social sciences, psychology, and application of science for the public good.

Elsevier is now offering an automatic, free service to authors: By publishing in an Elsevier journal, the author will be notified, when his/her article has been cited when the citing articles have been indexed in Scopus. (Self-citations are not included.)

A broader, similar service is been available to all Scopus subscribers, of which Princeton is one. On every page that displays an article’s bibliographic data and abstract, there is a link at the right that allows for subscribing to a citation alert.

The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has commissioned a new research project to study the economic and social implications of new models for scholarly publishing. According to the findings of the research, sharing research information via a more open access (OA) publishing model would bring millions of pounds worth of savings to the higher education sector apart from benefiting corporate UK. Prof. John Houghton from the Centre of Strategic Economic Studies at Melbourne’s Victoria University and Prof. Charles Oppenheim at Loughborough University were asked to lead the research.

The research centred on three models – subscription or toll access publishing which involves reader charges and use restrictions; OA publishing where access is free and publication is funded from the authors’ side; and OA self-archiving where academic authors post their work in online repositories, making it freely available to all Internet users.

The research and findings reveal that core scholarly publishing system activities cost the UK higher education sector around £5 billion in 2007. Using the different models, the report shows what the estimated cost would have been. When considering costs per journal article, the researchers believe that the UK higher education sector could have saved around £80 million a year by shifting from toll access to OA publishing. They also claim that £115 million could be saved by moving from toll access to OA self-archiving.

In addition to that, the financial return to the UK industry from greater accessibility to research might result in an additional £172 million per annum worth of benefits from government and higher education sector research alone.

"To further enhance accessibility to the NTIS collection, NTIS will be launching the National Technical Reports Library (NTRL) during early Spring 2009.

The NTRL will provide access to:

Bibliographic records of more than 2,000,000 technical reports

Downloadable full text of 500,000 of these reports in Portable Document Format

The NTRL operates on a subscription-based system interface that allows users to do queries on the large NTIS bibliographic database. The intent is to broadly expand and improve access to millions of bibliographic records (pre-1960 to present) and 500k full-text documents in Portable Document Format that are directly linked to the bibliographic database."

STM publisher Springer, Germany, and the International Union for Pure and Applied Biophysics (IUPAB) have announced the spring 2009 launch of the journal Biophysical Reviews. The journal will be the new official publication of the IUPAB. The entire IUPAB Council will form the editorial board of the new journal in order to demonstrate the close affiliation between the Springer journal and the IUPAB. Professor Jean Garnier of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) – Unité Mathématique Informatique et Génome (France) will serve as the editor-in-chief. He will work closely with the expert international editorial board.

A quarterly publication Biophysical Reviews will publish short and critical reviews from key scientists active in the field. The journal will cover the entire field of biophysics, generally defined as the science of describing biological phenomena and resolving their underlying principles using the concepts and techniques of physics. This includes areas such as bioinformatics, biophysical methods and instrumentation, medical biophysics, biosystems and cell biophysics.

Springer will publish Biophysical Reviews in both print and electronic formats. It will be available via Springer’s online information platform, www.springerlink.com. The journal will include fast, electronic publication in Online First, as well as Cross Reference Linking and Table of Content Alerts. All potential authors have the option, via the Springer Open Choice programme, of publishing their articles using the open access publishing model.

Scientific publisher RSC Publishing, UK, the publishing arm of the Royal Society of Chemistry, has announced the online publication of the first issue of a new interdisciplinary journal – Metallomics: Integrated biometal science. The journal will appeal to chemical scientists, bio-scientists and environmental scientists from across academia, industry and government.

While Metallomics will publish 6 issues in 2009, it will increase its publishing frequency to 12 issues in 2010. Metallomics issue 1 contains 3 critical reviews and 8 primary research articles. In a landmark new paper, Hiromu Sakurai and colleagues in Japan describe how a drug based on a chemical found in garlic may be a potential new candidate for treating both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, while Jennifer A. Meyer and Dana M. Spence review the role of metals in diabetes.

Metallomics comes just one week after RSC Publishing launched Integrative Biology, a new journal covering the quantitative biosciences. The journal also published its first issue online. The current issues of both journals will be freely available to all web users throughout 2009 and 2010. Institutional online access to all 2009/2010 content is also free following a simple registration process.

Wholly owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry, RSC Publishing publishes a wide range of journals, magazines, databases and books. It claims to be one of the largest publishers of chemical science information.